A Guy Walks Into a Bar & Reason to Kill a Man.

I really want Mob City to blow me away. Unfortunately, the creators seem to think that film noir is only interesting because of its oblique conversation, cigarette smoke, and fedoras. If so, they might as well have made a show about modern Brooklynites.

I'm a fan of film noir and would love to watch it every week on television. I also want to see Frank Darabont succeed after being ignominiously dumped from the Walking Dead. Finally, I can't hang one of the posters on my wall if the show sucks. (Actually, as an adult, I probably couldn't have that amount of naked hip on my wall unless Botticelli painted it.)

As the aforementioned promotional materials indicate, Mob City is a good looking show. The sets are gorgeous, the direction is top notch, and every frame pops with color in a way that is too rare on TV.

However, there's an emptiness at the heart of Mob City that begins with the painfully generic title and seeps through every scene of the show. It's all style with very little substance. 

Joe Teague

It's a passable beginning, even if it's hard to get too excited by a voiceover. (I guess you can't choose what turns you on.) While Joe is set up as the typical man in grey, he just doesn't seem grey enough. Maybe its because the villains are so much worse. Maybe it's because he's the show's hero. Maybe I'm morally bankrupt. Either way, his decision to turn down the mob's money makes him seem like a good guy, even if he did shoot Simon Pegg. (After all, someone had to do it. The man's got movies to make.)

Jasmine Fontaine

B

William Parker

B+In the opening monologue, Joe mentions that there are still a few white hats left in the world. LA Chief of Police William Parker is one of them. We don't learn much about Parker this week, but he does get a pretty fantastic introduction at the beginning of the second hour. When he defuses a hostage situation and apprehends the perpetrator single-handedly, he proves himself to be tough, capable, and determined in a pretty badass way. (Plus, Neal McDonough was on Band of Brothers so you know his character is going to be a boss.)

I have one fairly minor quibble with the show's treatment of Parker. Early on, the mayor is giving a speech about corruption and when he talks about corrupt cops, the camera settles on Parker in the crowd. This reads as Parker being singled out as a crooked cop, which he pretty clearly is not.

The Gangsters

C Mob City's gangsters are quite the bunch: Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel were legendary real-life mobsters. However, they mostly just sit around and scheme this week, which isn't particularly interesting or fun. Hopefully, the coming weeks will see conflict within the ranks of the mobsters. If not, then their scenes could get very boring very quickly.

"A Guy Walks Into a Bar"& "Reason to Kill a Man"

C+The biggest problem with "A Guy Walks Into a Bar" and "Reason to Kill a Man" (other than their titles) is the inability to build a compelling mystery. The lack of an active central character hurts here, as does Darabont's unwillingness to put us in Joe's headspace. In the best mysteries, both the audience and detective know the same set of facts. The only thing withheld is the detective's inferences, the connections he draws between these seemingly unrelated incidents. However, we aren't on even footing with Joe (our hero). He is presumably aware that Jasmine is a photographer and his ex-wife but we don't know that. As a result, Joe's decision to shoot Simon Pegg isn't mysterious. Rather, it's incomprehensible. The fact that Joe there's no indication that Joe and Jasmine were married (in spite of the conversations between the two) until the end of hour two is emblematic of the other big problem with the show's mysteries.

Darabont seems unaware that a compelling mystery isn't built by withholding information. It's built by overloading the detective and audience with facts that don't add up or that seem to contradict one other. There has to be a sense of putting together an impossible puzzle. Without that, the story has no drive. We're just sitting around, waiting for someone to finally say what motivates them. And that's boring.

Extra Credit

• Was that an uncredited Joel McKinnon Miller giving Parker orders in the flashback to the hostage situation?

Demerits

• This show had a location called Bunny's Jungle Club. While I'm sure it's realistic, it's also ridiculous.
• Some of the "hard boiled" dialogue is pretty ridiculous. My personal favorite bad exchange was between Simon Pegg (Hecky) and Joe in Bunny's Jungle Club.

HECKY: You the guy?
JOE: The guy.
HECKY: Yeah, the guy.
JOE: Nah, that guy left. I'm the other guy. The one drinking.

What's your favorite bit of dialog, good or bad? Comment below. Am I being too hard on Mob City? Did any of you really love it?

Let's play SPOT! THE! REFERENCE!

1. When Joe returns the money, his buddy covers it with his had and estimates how much the stack is worth, just like Don Fanucci in The Godfather Part II.
2. When Rothmen guns down the two guys in the restaurant, one seems to be wearing his best J.J. Gittes costume. He probably got a little nosey, like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.
3. All that nonsense about the Inverted Jenny had to be a reference to either The Simpsons or Foyle's War (probably the former). I'll be honest, I initially though it was a Charade homage but I checked and that particular stamp never makes an appearance.
4. I was pretty sure that the murder in the confessional was a reference to something but couldn't place it. Any ideas? Anything else I didn't catch?